I had a friend who wasn't very technical who had some issue where he couldn't boot into his OS (Windows) and bought a new computer, but wanted the files off the old computer. So he asked me for help. I remember bringing a Knoppix live CD (remember Knoppix?) And when I was there, I realized I had a severe lack of general networking equipment. (I didn't have a switch, so I couldn't plug both computers into the network so they could communicate with each other and the internet.)
So I started up the old computer in Knoppix, plugged it into the network, and installed a bunch of networking packages like a DHCP server and such. And then I used the Ethernet cable to plug the two computers into each other, letting the Knoppix box give the new Windows machine its IP. And then I installed Putty on the Windows machine and used it to SCP the files from the old machine to the new one.
The whole thing went way smoother than I'd have expected, never having attempted that before. But I felt like such a hacker that day. Lol.
Z is only depth if your camera happens to be at the origin facing in the positive Z direction, though. In most games, the camera almost never rotates except about a vertical axis, though, so Z as the vertical axis stays vertical always. (Exceptions being space sims, that leaning-around-the-corner maneuver in a lot of games where the camera tips, games with shifting gravity, etc.)
I dunno. Z as up always felt more intuitive to me. It's just another thing to argue about like Vim vs Emacs and tabs vs spaces, I guess.